


Our prison strong

by shiva_goddessof



Category: Firefly, Serenity (2005)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Little Mouse, Post BDM, Post Serenity, Riverthink, Talking to the dead, altered perception, messing with your amygdala, serenity is the 10th character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2020-11-03
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:28:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27325039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shiva_goddessof/pseuds/shiva_goddessof
Summary: River ghosts the ship, on mouse feet. Not alone; never alone. Less alone than ever, now. They made Little Mouse smaller and smaller and smaller, but she didn’t melt away. She couldn’t. What she’s made of won’t dissolve.A post-BDM vignette on the mental state of all our characters, as seen through River.
Relationships: Kaylee Frye/Simon Tam, Malcolm Reynolds/Inara Serra, River Tam & Serenity Crew
Comments: 6
Kudos: 9





	Our prison strong

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Chosen Family](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/709231) by ladlebasking. 



> Takes place during the final montage of the BDM, post the engine room scene and before final takeoff.

River ghosts the ship, on mouse feet. Not alone; never alone. Less alone than ever, now. They made Little Mouse smaller and smaller and smaller, but she didn’t melt away. She couldn’t. What she’s made of won’t dissolve.

Wash doesn’t walk the ship. He is always in his chair, and his hands are behind his head and he’s staring at the Black or talking to his dinosaurs. He doesn’t mind Little Mouse. He talks to her sometimes.

A cloud of _lust_ and _excitement_ and _release_ is still swirling around Kaylee’s bunk, of which the dominant note is Kaylee, triumph and satiety: _Finally_ . Finally in my bed/arms/body; finally open/naked/helpless. Simon is asleep (already) (but Kaylee doesn’t mind) (why would she mind, it’s night and they’ve finished the intercourse. Doesn’t make _sense_ . Unreasonable. More data needed). Simon is fuzzed around the edges with the painkillers that he is carefully tapering down and the exhaustion of stress/healing, but he doesn’t feel the same as when he was sleeping after Early shot him. He’s deeply under already and he isn’t dreaming, his mind is murmuring in a familiar way, processing on several tracks at once, but he doesn’t feel the _same_. Kaylee doesn’t feel like she ever has since River came aboard; she’s crying somewhere, somewhere deep, pictures of Book holding her hand in the infirmary and Wash passing her tools and little Hiroko lying face down in the dirt. But Kaylee doesn’t want to think of those things right now, so she doesn’t. She wants to think about Simon. She wants to think about sex.

Then she ventures just a little too far, wants to look under what is glowing in Kaylee’s mind, and it’s too much, she’s too close, it’s too strong. Kaylee’s thoughts about _Simon_ and _sex_ are too strange, too much like being in a room with the air sucked out. (Little Mouse had to do that once, it hurt, it hurt like fire. Gates of burning adamant.) They’re pressed up close and their arms and legs are all jumbled up together, they have to be, the bed is tiny. But somehow, River senses, they would want to be like this anyway, even if they had more space. Kaylee’s skin where Simon’s sleeping skin is touching it does not feel like anything River has ever felt.

(Why would someone want someone else in their body? River already has the correct and appropriate number of parts. Invasive, hot, unnecessary. Can cause pain and discomfort and more people who are not wanted.)

Kaylee is touching Simon’s hair now. Over and over in the same way. This is too strange.

The cloud around Zoe’s bunk is denser and slower, Zoe’s bunk that just over a week ago was Zoe and Wash’s bunk. Zoe thought about putting her hand there, between her legs, when she lay down, but then she didn’t. It turned dark and twisted and the cloud was cold and it burned. Zoe deliberately lies on the wrong side of the bed, the one that doesn’t belong to her, balances on the edge even, because she is more afraid than she has ever been of a gun, more afraid than she was of the Reavers, that she will wake up and think Wash is just up on the bridge and she will have to know it all over again.

Zoe’s body feels the wrong size for her. Zoe heard the sounds, faint stifled sounds, and she didn’t want to listen but she couldn’t not. Zoe wishes, in a part of her mind that she wouldn’t let herself turn away from, that the bullet had gone deeper, torn Simon up more, because maybe then someone would feel how she feels. Zoe sees herself walking through a valley, a dusty barren valley full of bodies in bloodstained uniforms, and tells herself she was a fool to think she ever left. Zoe’s thoughts are sharp around the edges and they bleed, just a little, like the hole in Wash’s chest that River didn’t see except she can see what Zoe saw. Wash didn’t bleed much. The stain left on the seat wasn’t big. Zoe knows that means he died fast. Zoe is glad and not glad.

Zoe doesn’t like to sleep alone. She won’t sleep alone forever though. Maybe River will go and sleep with her, soon.

Being in Zoe’s head hurts for Zoe but it doesn’t hurt River. River understands pain and death and putting holes in people. It isn’t a place she wants to go, but she learned it so well, so thoroughly. It’s like a prayer she learned as a child. _Jugular aorta vena cava carotid subclavian femoral. Now I lay me down to sleep._ It unrolls like a dance.

Jayne yanked down his pants and started touching himself the second he got down the ladder. His head was a flip-book of images, the women on his walls, the women on the ship, whores he’d known, until he settled on a memory of the whore he’d had at the Heart of Gold. Helen, or that’s what she called herself, in his experience whores don’t use their real names. He liked her, her name reminded him of women he’d known as a child on Caliban, and he’d never been able to afford that much time with a whore before. She seemed to like it okay and she didn’t talk too much or look down on him and she looked back over her shoulder at him and bit her lip all artful-like and she didn’t mess up his guns. Jayne listened too, as hard as he could, all avid, half _lust_ and half _jealousy_ and half _contempt_. Simon (sweet Simon, simple Simon) has never understood why Jayne took against him so hard and fast. Thought it was his clothes and his accent and his ability to pretend he still had money, like it was for the captain. When he finished what he was doing it was like cleaning one of his guns, snap this into place, then that. Just something his hands know how to do that stops his head from thinking.

Zoe would put a fist through Jayne’s head if she knew how Jayne imagined her tonight. On her knees. How Jayne has already wondered how Zoe might console herself. Mal would put a bullet through his head if he knew that. 

Kaylee might not mind, River thinks. Not much anyway. Inara might mind and might not. Depending on how she is feeling and whether she has been fighting with the captain recently.

(He didn’t see River that way. River is marked off limits in Jayne’s head for reasons even Jayne is a little hazy on. River is just as glad. It’s hard enough seeing all the things people think about her without seeing her do _that.)_

Jayne turned dark too, afterwards. Lying alone and wondering why he had to get mixed up with this gorram crew, why they do nothing but drag him into trouble, why he had to go into a nest of Reavers and get his ass shot again so’s Mal could play the hero, all for the sake of a buncha marks who just laid down and died. Secretly Jayne thought that maybe he was really doing something that mattered for once, somethin’ good, somethin’ the Shepherd might lay a hand on his shoulder for and tell him without laughing it’ll be taken into account. Jayne thought things might really change, people might feel like givin the ruttin’ Alliance one in the eye, and here they are makin’ nice and takin’ Alliance charity like a bunch of _nuòfū._ Jayne doesn’t see much percentage in how things will be from now on, with Zoe cold as a stone and the Doc in Kaylee’s bed and that stuck-up whore yankin’ Mal around by his dick again and no more Shepherd to give a good gorram about what Jayne thought. Jayne thought maybe he would go see his momma, she ain’t written in too long. She is always Momma in his head, and he never lets anyone see the letters ‘cuz he don’t want them to know that’s how she signs them. Jayne thought how Kaylee reminded him of Momma, a little bit. Then he started snoring. 

He doesn’t feel any cleaner to River asleep than awake, but he is less like a knife blade. A shiv, one he made himself. He likes being close to his guns when he sleeps. They comfort him.

Inara is on her knees in the bare room in the passenger dorm next to River’s and her thoughts are a nest of snakes. She is meditating, she meditates every night, and while she meditates she is always aware of how she looks. She keeps her back straight and her hands placed perfectly on her thighs and she could draw herself from any angle, so that she always knows what a client would see if they came on her. It’s a meditation in itself, almost. One part of her is running through her meditation, smooth as music and familiar as pouring tea, and others are thinking of ten things at once, flitting through her like perfumed smoke. She is thinking of Kaylee, of how much she has needed Kaylee’s light, how much it hurt her to live without it. She is thinking of where Kaylee is right now and she is _amused_ and _jealous_ and truly _glad_ , gladder than anyone else. Everyone on the ship knows where Simon is, and why. She is thinking of the Reavers and how they smelled, that one that was on top of her, his breath, rotten meat, like the midden at the docks on Jiangyin that Mal led her into by accident, and she laid into him so hard that the argument went on for an hour. It was three days before she stopped smelling it on her clothes. He always has to bring her low. She is thinking with one tiny corner of her mind about River, but she thinks River is asleep. She doesn’t know that River is floating, that River is a ghost, that River never sleeps.

She is thinking, what will I do? Haven’t I learned anything? I can’t stay away, I learned that, but I can’t stay either, how can I be anything except what I am? How can I be what I am anywhere but here? And another part of her is thinking, I will put up yellow silks this time, instead of red, and burn juniper and cedar, they need me so much. And she is thinking, is Mal thinking of me?

River likes the cedar. It smells like the forests on Osiris that she used to go walking in. On trips from school, and then later sometimes with Simon. It covered up the other smells.

Inara is like the arrows she has hidden in a trunk again. She flies with such grace you forget she is sharp. But she has warped, she has bent a little in heat, in flame, and now she won’t fly as straight any more. 

Mal is sitting in the galley in the almost dark with his hand wrapped around a tin mug of whiskey, but he isn’t really drinking. He turned off the lights half an hour ago when Inara left. He doesn’t want to go to his bunk yet, he doesn’t know they have finished. He is thinking of his girl and her hurts, he feels them like they are in his body, and it makes his body feel hard and cold like the steel. When they hit the deck, his first thoughts were for his people, for Zoe and Wash and the soft bodies of all of his crew, and then for his girl, the ripping and tearing, the scream of metal. He didn’t feel his own body or the nausea from the G-force. He has a knot in his spine that won’t ease until they lift off tomorrow and he is back in the Black, he hates being here, keeping a straight face to the medics and mechanics who have sold out their skills to the Alliance, trapped on this barren rock expected to be grateful for that _húndàn’_ s handout.

Mal tells himself he doesn’t know why he left that _húndàn_ alive, except he does. Because losing your faith hurts worse than a sword. And he’d be dead now, he and the Doc, but for those medics, and his ship too. 

But mostly Mal thinks about the Signal. He sees it pouring out into space, like gas, like mist, can’t be stopped. He sees it getting into people’s heads, sees them deciding to push back, fight back. And he sees what happens, Serenity Valley again, and he wouldn’t take back a single gorram thing he’s done, then or since. The bodies, all the bodies, but at least on Hera people died for something, something they chose. They died free. 

River likes the captain’s mind. It circles like a wolf, but it is always in front of his people, if you are his you can stay in his shadow forever, and he’ll face down anything and growl. He gets bigger the more he has to protect. Right now he is thinking of Zoe too, and his mind hovers over her like a mother. Feeling her hurt everywhere, and he’d take it on if he knew how. He thinks about Zoe so that he can not think about Inara. Or Kaylee and Simon. Although a little part of him is thinking about how he will get some fun out of Simon over this. Because if he can’t laugh, there will be no Mal anymore. 

Shepherd Book is still here. She doesn’t know why nobody else knows it; he was still here when he was on Haven and he is still here now. (She tried to tell Simon before, that he was still down in the passenger lounge, reading his Bible, but Simon looked so worried, and then his brain became full of the names of drugs, his personal litany, the diazepines and the amines and the iams.) Right now he is sitting at the table with the Captain and his face is full of quiet pride. He doesn’t speak, but he knows what the captain thinks and his hand is on the table in a way that the captain would recognise if the captain could see him. A grasp without touching. Book is waiting but he is not afraid any more. He knows the captain will fly true. Later he will go back down to his bunk and read, and tell River good morning when she passes. He always keeps his hair tied back now. In deference to River’s sensibilities. 

Wash and the Shepherd are the only people who can see Little Mouse when she walks the ship at night. And Serenity. Kaylee’s girl, the captain’s girl, River’s girl. She breathes to River and tells of her approval, her acceptance, her love. Of how she needs to be loved and known. Of how she will keep them all safe, as long as she can. As far as she can.

It’s getting towards morning. River lets her ghost drift back up onto the bridge again. Wash is still there, waiting. “Morning, kid,” he says, and yawns. “Wanna see some stars?”

**Author's Note:**

> Title from _Paradise Lost_ :
> 
> ...long is the way  
> And hard, that out of hell leads up to light;  
> Our prison strong, this huge convex of fire,  
> Outrageous to devour, immures us round  
> Ninefold, and gates of burning adamant  
> Barred over us prohibit all egress.
> 
> River as "Little Mouse" comes from The R. Tam Sessions, which I do recommend watching on YouTube if you haven't already.
> 
> I have a number of thoughts about River and her relationship with sex, which are discussed in [ this character essay in my LJ](https://shiva-goddessof.livejournal.com/3306.html).


End file.
